Author Ha Jin, who was born in the People’s Republic and lived there until he left to attend college in the United States in 1985, offers a unique perspective on Chinese culture, different from that which appears in most “Chinese” novels written for an American audience. Setting this novel primarily in a POW camp in South Korea, where Chinese and North Korean troops, captured by US and South Korean soldiers, have been separately interned during the 1950s war, Ha Jin focuses on the different attitudes each group has toward home, country, and each other. Through Yu Yuan, a young soldier from the Chinese Communist army, Ha Jin shows how differently Yuan evaluates his life and his obligations but how similarly he holds to ideals of friendship, justice, honor, and love.
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Setting this monumental family saga in Gaomi, in northeast China, where he grew up, Mo Yan, a member of the People’s Liberation Army who studied writing at their art academy, presents a realistic, rather than glorified, picture of life in China. Vividly portraying political and historical events—most of them bloody—over the course of the twentieth century, he portrays family life in rural China from the Boxer Rebellion to the Communist Revolution, the Japanese invasion, the Cultural Revolution, and the death of Mao. Shangguan Lu’s early marriage and domestic life unfolds through flashbacks. Through the developing stories of the eight daughters, their marriages, and their careers, the history of China from 1939 to the 1990s unfolds. Mo Yan’s novel is big, and it is important, the first really thorough portrait of rural life in China during the major historical movements of the twentieth century. His style, while often exciting is also brutally realistic and graphic in its violence. Though the author includes legends and cultural traditions as part of his picture of family life, the Shangguan family comes alive primarily through minute details.
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When the Ibis, a “blackbirder” leaves Calcutta and sets out across the Bay of Bengal, carrying “indentured migrants,” many of whom will become the equivalent of slaves, the seas darken and become stormy. As the ship tosses and conditions deteriorate, the ship soon becomes a microcosm for life on land, full of tumult and unexpected twists of fate, and each person’s heart is laid bare. Everybody aboard is escaping from something, so anxious to put their problems behind them that they see no choice but to submit to the atrocious living conditions and sometimes sadistic overseers aboard the Ibis. Set in India in 1838, at the outset of the three-year Opium War between the British and the Chinese, this epic novel follows several characters from different levels of society, who become united through their personal lives aboard the ship and, more generally, through their connections to the opium and slave trades.
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